The Daily Beast. | Web Story. | August 3, 2018.

Pop culture tells us one thing about eating disorders: It’s a ‘white girl’ disease.

From The Bachelor to Natalie Portman’s Nina in Black Swan to Lily Collins’ Ellen in To the Bone, eating disorders seem to only affect affluent white girls on screen. And, as Kim Kardashian showed earlier this week in a series of Instagram videos that received an instant backlash, being called "anorexic" is problematically deemed a compliment.

But eating disorders don't only affect white females, and the glorification of eating disorders is dangerous. Black girls and women suffer from eating disorders too, but advocates argue that teachers, doctors, faith leaders, and even therapists don’t always catch an eating disorder when a woman of color walks through the door.

That's what happened to Stephanie Covington Armstrong, author of Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat. "Everyone assumed all of the stereotypes: Black girls are more comfortable with our bodies. We like being heavier. We don't develop eating disorders," she told The Daily Beast. "So I could hide in plain sight."

Covington Armstrong's memoir follows her struggle with yo-yo dieting, orthorexia (an obsession with healthy food), starving, and bingeing. "It's like an addict sampling drugs: you do just a little here, a little there, and then eventually they're doing you," she said.

But it took her a long time to seek help.

PBS Next Avenue. | Web Story. | June 22, 2018.

At some point during her stay in the memory care wing of a large, long-term facility in Hamilton Township, N.J., Marie Tykarski started to complain of pain. Getting to the bottom of what happened — understanding how and why she got hurt — took time.

“My mother-in-law was in a state of dementia, so we couldn’t get answers from her,” said Rich Allegretti. “She couldn’t explain anything, except that she hurt.

“I don’t think she knew what hurt, but she knew that she was in severe pain,” he added. “She knew something was wrong, but she couldn’t describe it.”

The family eventually learned that Tykarski fractured her femur. Twice. In three weeks. She shattered the same leg at two fracture sites. Surgeons performed what’s called an open reduction internal fixation procedure, inserting plates and screws.

Craig Hubert, a partner at the law firm Szaferman, Lakind, Blumstein & Blader, took on the case. In 2011, the firm filed a civil suit, alleging neglect. The case was later settled out of court.

“This was a mistake, and quite frankly, if there had been a video camera in that room, after the first fracture, the administration, the nurses and all of the caregivers would have learned from the improper transfer procedure,” Hubert said. He asserted that there’s “a substantial likelihood” that a camera would have prevented Tykarski’s second injury.

Center for Cooperative Media. | Web Story. | May 21, 2018.

In his keynote presentation at the 2018 Collaborative Journalism Summit, Grégoire Lemarchand, the deputy editor in chief and head of social networks at Agence France-Presse, spoke about how American journalists might use lessons learned from CrossCheck, a collaborative verification project, in preparation for this year’s midterm elections.

CrossCheck, a collaboration between 37 partners across France and the United Kingdom, focused on covering “false, misleading, and confusing claims that circulated online” in the 10 weeks before the 2017 French presidential election.

“Participants were under a common sense of public service,” Lemarchand said. In the weeks leading up to the election, he said, the French public’s trust in the media was very low — dangerously low. “There was really a global feeling that the threat of this disinformation is so big and serious that we have to work together. If we allow this information to spiral out of control, we will be left crying, as the public will no longer know what is true. If people cannot trust, then democracy can’t work.”

CrossCheck, which was launched by Jenni Sargent, the managing director of First Draft, wasn’t just limited to newsrooms — journalists were joined by teams at universities, nonprofits and tech companies. Google News Lab in Paris and Facebook gave financial and technical support to the project.

Center for Cooperative Media. | Web Story. | May 20, 2018.

After a quick round of wine, cheese and appetizers in the lobby of Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media building, the Collaborative Journalism Summit officially began with a keynote presentation and discussion about ethnic media.

After Keith Strudler, the director of the School of Communication and Media, and Stefanie Murray, the director of the Center for Cooperative Media, made introductory remarks, they welcomed opening keynote speaker Daniela Gerson, a senior fellow at the Democracy Fund and assistant professor at California State University Northridge.

Gerson’s talk was based on a series of research articles she and Carlos Rodriguez recently authored for the American Press Institute’s Strategy Studies: “How can mainstream and ethnic media team up to produce better journalism?” The series launched in October. A fourth installment is forthcoming.

Gerson began her talk by defining “ethnic media,” a term that, she emphasized, is “imperfect.” Other related terms include minority media, diaspora media or immigrant media, though none of these terms are universally accepted.

The Daily Beast. | Web Story. | April 5, 2018.

Try to recall a conversation without hearing it in your head. It’s difficult, because sound impacts our memory formation. That’s why we forget the milk at the store, and leave without the one thing we came for: we heard the instructions, but we didn’t really listen.

Maintaining a sound in your mind’s ear—that is, how we imagine it, keep hearing it, and retrieve it after it’s gone—is called auditory working memory.

This cognitive capacity to keep sounds in mind for a short period of time was the focus of a paper published in Neuron by a team at McGill University’s Brain Imaging Centre. The studytested the efficacy of a non-invasive brain therapy called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. Using a hand-held device placed against the scalp, the researchers positioned the targeted, oscillating pulses (at 5 Hz) into the brain in order to stimulate nerve cells. (The pulses are reportedly not painful.)

The group found some surprising results. TMS seemed to directly improve the working memory of 17 participants in a recall task. Participants were asked to recognize a melody when the order of notes played back was reversed. After TMS treatment, they were able to remember the series of sounds quicker, and more accurately.

The Daily Beast. | Web Story. | February 5, 2018.

Imagine sitting next to a bored stranger fidgeting with a pen. The room is silent, except for that pen. Quiet amplifies—it makes everything sound louder. Yet for people who suffer from misophonia, every tap of that pen is louder than a chisel removing tile. The man on the train breathes with more force than a motorcycle. And that co-worker chews gum as if she were a cow in front of a microphone. 

Misophonia—an emotional, decreased tolerance to sound—can make some situations feel uncomfortable, or even unbearable: anger, disgust, anxiety, avoidance. But the first trial for the condition, published recently in the Journal of Affective Disorders, claims to have found an effective treatment: cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

“Despite the high burden of this condition, to date there is no evidence-based treatment available,” first author Arjan Schröder wrote in the abstract. Schröder and a team of Dutch researchers treated 90 patients with CBT for eight group sessions, every other week, and found that CBT was effective for half of the patients. What’s more, patients who had more severe symptoms were more likely to respond to treatment.

The Daily Beast. | Web Story. | January 16, 2018.

If you say that you’re allergic to penicillin—a narrow-spectrum antibiotic that, for many bacterial infections, is still considered to be a “wonder drug”—your doctor won’t prescribe it. Once you write it on those forms in the waiting room, or tell your pharmacist, “penicillin allergy” becomes part of your permanent medical record.

Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that most people who say they’re allergic to penicillin are, well, wrong. In a recent study published in Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology, nearly 90 percent of patients who had “penicillin allergy” listed on their medical charts were found to actually have no such allergy at all.

“There’s this problem—what you could consider an epidemic—of people labeled with unverified penicillin allergy. It’s the number one drug allergy that’s listed in patients’ records,” Dr. Dave Khan, a professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and co-author of the study, told The Daily Beast. Over 1 in 10—up to 15 percent—of Americans has a reported penicillin allergy. That’s more than the number of adults in the U.S. who have hay fever (7.8 percent), and the number of children under age three who have food allergies (8.0 percent).

The Daily Beast. | Web Story. | December 24, 2017.

Shortly after five o’clock on a Sunday evening in February 2013, a severe EF4 tornado ripped through Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Winds whirling up to 170 mph tore through town, warping what seemed solid and upending the community. A church’s steeple was ripped off, along with roof after roof on main street. A vehicle parked near the baseball stadium was taken up by the twister and spit out near the pitching mound in the middle of the field, according to the storm report.

As soon as he saw the wreckage on TV—homes reduced to rubble, power lines snapped, mangled trees and traffic lights—Dr. Italo Subbarao panicked.

“I remember thinking, 'I can see my grandma’s house,'” he recalled. “'But an ambulance can’t get out there!'”

That his grandmother was remote and isolated from emergency help ignited worry within Subbarao, an osteopathic physician specializing in emergency care.

So he began tinkering with a solution: an aerial ambulance that could fly above the chaos on the ground, with live-saving medical supplies in tow.

Scientific American. | Web Story. | Print Story. (June 2017: Volume 316, Issue 6) | May 16, 2017.

Pizza has a proud history of fueling late-night lab work, and scientists in Naples—an Italian city famous for its slice—have easy access to some of the world's tastiest take-out. But what inspires engineer Bruno Siciliano is not just that first bite so much as how the dish is made.

“Preparing a pizza involves an extraordinary level of agility and dexterity,” says Siciliano, who directs a robotics research group at the University of Naples Federico II. Stretching a deformable object like a lump of dough requires a precise and gentle touch. It is one of the few things humans can handle, but robots cannot—yet.

Siciliano's team has been developing a robot nimble enough to whip up a pizza pie, from kneading dough to stretching it out, adding ingredients and sliding it into the oven. RoDyMan (short for Robotic Dynamic Manipulation) is a five-year project supported by a €2.5-million grant from the European Research Council.

The Tab. | Web Story. | February 14, 2017.

Being a woman in science isn’t easy. In most situations, you have to deal with everything that comes with being the only woman in the room. In Hidden Figures, a new film based on the true story of NASA’s female “computers”, Taraji P. Henson depicts this perfectly as legendary mathematician Katherine G. Johnson, who was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 2016 for her contributions to the space program.

Katherine G. Johnson’s calculations got us to the moon — but for many women studying and working in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), race and gender can be a strong tether. Everyone brings their own assumptions to work. What’s difficult on the daily can be a range of unequal treatment, access, and bias, from micro-aggressions to sexual harassment.

This week, on February 11, the UN Headquarters in NYC hosted the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, with actions to reduce gender bias and increase opportunities, funding, and social support for women who study, research, and work in STEM.

Keystone Crossroads. | Web Story. | February 9, 2017.

Amazon plans to hire 100,000 workers in the next year and a half, with 2,500 of them in New Jersey.

While they are not minimum-wage jobs, the pace of work can be very demanding.

As a business, shipping is like real estate: Location is everything. That's why Amazon has eight fulfillment centers in Pennsylvania, seven in New Jersey, and two in Delaware to deliver to your door as quickly as possible. But John Carr, a spokesman for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said the "free" shipping from Amazon comes at a cost.

"Their performance standards are very, very high. When you meet one, they tend to ... raise that speed and standard of how many orders you can pick and pull and pack in a certain amount of time. And Amazon tracks that," Carr said. "I think a lot of these workers get hurt because of the pace that they have to maintain to meet the goals set by Amazon."

Machinists were behind at least one failed drive to unionize the warehouses. Company spokeswoman Lauren Lynch said Amazon gives warehouse workers the exact same benefits as other employees, including health insurance, retirement plans, paid parental leave, and company stock.

Princeton Alumni Weekly. | Web Story. | September 28, 2016.

Nancy Rappaport ’82 has devoted her entire career to medicine. A child psychiatrist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, she’s worked in the Cambridge, Mass., public school system for over two decades. Rappaport says her specialty is “angry teenagers” — and something about her hearty laugh says she doesn’t usually have trouble keeping up.

In August 2015, she was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. With three children of her own — one currently in med school — the longtime runner (13 Boston Marathons and counting) says she was stopped in her tracks.

“That transition — going from a doctor to a patient — has really opened me up,” she says. “For me, it was early-stage breast cancer. For other people, it could be a mild heart attack, or a major depression. Those things are relatively common for doctors to manage, but still, it can feel like earth-shattering news.”

Princeton Alumni Weekly. | Web Story. | August 24, 2016.

Izzy Kasdin ’14 is a proud local. She knows the rhythms of the town and University: how the campus fills and empties each year, marked by a calendar of beginnings, breaks, Reunions, and departures. She grew up in Princeton.

At 14, Kasdin began volunteering as a docent with the Princeton Historical Society, a non-profit committed to sharing its own sense of the “local.” In January, the organization named Kasdin as its new executive director.

“It was a complete shock,” Kasdin remembers. She says although she didn’t formally apply to the position, her return to Princeton “makes perfect sense.”

It was the Historical Society, after all, that first introduced her to the field of museum curation and preservation. As a teen, her first task was to greet visitors at the door. Then, in 2008, the Historical Society organized an exhibition about political participation and activism. At the closing of the exhibit, Kasdin remembers taking the time to carefully pack up a women’s suffrage banner.

Princeton Alumni Weekly. | Web Story. | July 27, 2016.

Fifteen blocks. That’s how far Puerto Rican spoken word poet Ian Martinez ’01 walks every Wednesday, blasting his pump-up playlist through his headphones.

For Martinez, it’s not just a walk through Seattle. It’s a step away from his “white-collar job” at Microsoft, and a step towards the microphone on the intense-yet-intimate stage at Jai Thai on Broadway, home of the Rain City Poetry Slam.

Though he considers himself to be a “real newcomer and rookie,” Martinez is the current Grand Champion of the Rain City Poetry Slam. He earned that title by winning the Rain City slam’s finals in April, which attracted 250 people.

“Spoken word is a unique art form because it combines storytelling, traditional verse, and wordplay,” Martinez says. “Your energy has to match the room’s, and then take it up a notch. If you deliver, and the room gives you back the love you put into the poem, that’s the greatest feeling an artist can have.”

Princeton Alumni Weekly. | Web Story. | July 6, 2016.

Glenn H. Shepard Jr. ’87 has a lush and noisy backyard: Toucans squawk, parrots chatter, monkeys howl. He lives in the middle of the jungle. Settled in Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, Shepard works as a full-time researcher and ethnology curator at the Goeldi Museum in Belém do Pará, Brazil.

Some might say Shepard lives in paradise. Yet as an ethnobotanist — a researcher interested in how cultures use plants, especially as medicine — Shepard’s work focuses on illness, pain, and stress. Every culture, he says, has found ways to heal.  

Shepard is a medical anthropologist who has dedicated himself to the Matsigenka, an indigenous people who live in Manú National Park, an isolated natural wonder deep within the Peruvian rain forest. This June, Shepard’s work was featured in National Geographic: “This Park in Peru Is Nature ‘in Its Full Glory’—With Hunters,” by Emma Harris.

Princeton Alumni Weekly. | Web Story. | Print Story. | July 6, 2016

The Princeton Hidden Minority Council presented green graduation cords to 33 seniors during a ceremony May 15 for first-generation and low-income students. About 55 people attended the event in the Carl A. Fields Center. Speakers included council co-founders Brittney Watkins ’16 and Dallas Nan ’16 and management consultant Jeremy White ’96, who gave the keynote address. 

About 600 people attended the Pan-African Graduation May 29 in Richardson Auditorium. Tennille Haynes, director of the Fields Center, said the event recognized students’ “hardships and their struggles. With sit-ins and protests, our students have been creative in finding ways to be heard.” Seniors Aisha Oxley and Kujegi Camara performed a spoken-word poem about learning to stand up for their identities as students of color.

Princeton Alumni Weekly. | Web Story. | Print Story. | June 1, 2016.

The final scene of Stephanie Leotsakos ’16’s chamber opera, OMG, opens with a World War II veteran clasping an amulet to his heart, weeping about the memory of his mother, Anna. His daughter, Anna Francesca, walks into the room, distracted by her cellphone. Her Snapchats and emojis are projected onto the screen behind the stage; for a moment, the only music is the sound of screen swipes and texting. Then Anna looks up — and she sees her father crying. “OMG,” she sings, and drops her phone. 

OMG, Leotsakos’ senior-thesis opera, premiered April 23 in Taplin Auditorium. The 51-minute production featured eight singers and 10 musicians. The story opens in A.D. 550 near the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy; over six scenes, it moves toward the present day. 

“OMG is by far the most complex thing I have ever created,” said Leotsakos, who learned the violin at 3, the piano at 4, and the viola at 9. She started composing two years ago.

Philadelphia Business Journal. Web Story. May 23, 2016.

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) just celebrated a milestone in its research on fusion energy. After nearly four years of round-the-clock work by 250 people, the PPPL completed a $94 million upgrade to its flagship fusion facility, the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX-U).

Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz donned a white hard hat to tour the NSTX-U's test cell facility and the 85-ton machine at the center.

The NSTX-U is a fusion energy experiment contained in a spherical tokamak reactor. This design is an apple-core shape that requires less energy than traditional tokamaks, which are bulkier (and often more expensive to operate).

Like the sun, the NSTX-U is powered by fusion.

Princeton Alumni Weekly. | Web Story. | May 11, 2016.

War, a new play directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz ’06 and written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ’06, premiered May 21 in New York at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater. It’s a story about family battles: Siblings Tate (Chris Myers) and Joanne’s (Rachel Nicks) relationship turns combative when their mother (Charlayne Woodard) has a stroke, and an inheritance is in limbo.

As director and playwright, Blain-Cruz and Jacobs-Jenkins are creative siblings, so to speak: They have supported one another for nearly a decade.

“Branden and I met as classmates,” says Blain-Cruz, a Yale M.F.A. grad who directed War’s world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theater last year. “We’ve each seen almost everything the other has done. And this play — a huge play about family and history — felt like the right piece for us to work on together.”

Princeton Alumni Weekly. | Web Story. | April 20, 2016.

This spring, Diana Weymar ’91, a textile artist and curator based in Victoria, British Columbia, returned to Princeton. A mother of four, she left the view from her studio desk — a Blue Heron nest, grazing deer, a salty waft settling in, blocks from the ocean — to be the Anne Reeves Artist-in-Residence at the Arts Council of Princeton.

Weymar’s collaborative sewing project, “Interwoven Stories,” seeks to stich the Princeton community together.

“This project asks participants to stitch a page — and some are spending months on it — to then contribute to the community,” Weymar says. This spring, she led sewing workshops and handed out nearly 230 blank “pages” at the Princeton Public Library.

“So often we make something of importance or value to us and then keep or sell it,” she continues. “It’s a risk for some, and second nature to others. Each person has a different reaction to the blank fabric page.”

Princeton Alumni Weekly. | Web Story. | March 30, 2016. 

“Read me, it called then. It still does,” writes Lauret Savoy ’81 in her new memoir, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award and nominee for a Pushcart Prize.

This is how Savoy, a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College, describes the beloved map she’s carried for years — a large, “creased, taped, and re-taped” roll she’s unfurled on every cross-country trip since Princeton, “since that day in college when Professor Judson handed out copies to his geomorphology class.”

Savoy’s map, as she recalls in Trace’s fifth chapter, “What’s in a Name,” is a hand-drawn and inked copy by “master cartographer-artist” Erwin Raisz. It’s also something she “reads” — which suggests that Savoy sees her map as something more than the shaded, textured terrain of “physiographic landforms”; her map, like Trace, is a text.